Buffer Bloat is the overuse of buffering in network equipment. Well meaning but misguided and, most likely, stupid equipment vendors have tried to avoid packet loss by increasing the the buffers in the network. But they have missed a fundamental property of TCP and UDP protocols, if they live in a buffer for too long, the receiver will time out and request retransmission. As a result, data is transmitted twice or three times.

To make matters worse, the overbuffering causes TCP fast start algorithm failure. That is, TCP must acknowledge receipt of frames and if those ACK packet are stuck in a buffer, the next tranche of data cannot be sent. Therefore, bandwidth is unused to since TCP cannot burst into the available capacity.

In this podcast, we talk to Jim Gettys, who first published his take on the problem and comprehensively proved it. Since then, things have started to happen.

Here in our boardroom that is fully equipped with keen minds, practical and bitter experiences, and overblown sense of what the future should look like, we attempt to tackle the issues that matter to the networking engineers.

About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, a wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

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